I lived in Dallas for about 4 years before I moved to Colorado, and while I was there working as a consultant, I had my first experience with Indian food. I was working on a Saturday and my boss at the time took me to eat out as a way to thank me for working after hours. We went to an Indian food buffet, which are usually not very spicy since buffet food has to please the masses. Well for some reason this buffet was extremely spicy, and of course I felt obligated to eat a lot, since my boss was paying for the meal. Maybe my taste buds are more used to spicy food now, or maybe that particular buffet really was incredibly spicy, but needless to say, my first experience was not a happy one and I felt more like I was being punished than rewarded.

When I first started dating Jeremy, he loved Indian food, and after a lot of convincing I decided to give it another try. He had me order mild Chicken Tikka Masala which is about as Americanized as you can go with Indian food and we had a side of Vegetable Pakora to go with it – basically deep fried vegetables and onion rings. I was shocked to discover that I actually enjoyed this Indian food and wanted to eat more of it. Well, we now live about 1 mile from a really good little Indian food restaurant and ordered food all of the time from it up until a few months ago. And, I’ve branched out too, trying spicier and less American style Indian, and pretty much like it all now.

Now that I’ve been diagnosed with celiac disease we’ve pretty much stopped eating out. I’ve tried eating out at a few places since my diagnosis but apparently am just very sensitive, so for the most part we have just been eating at home. Consequently, we have not had Indian food in some time, and I’ve really been craving it!

Jeremy ran across these gluten-free sauces in our grocery store a few weeks ago and we’ve already had them for dinner several times now. They are made by Seeds of Change, are all organic, and the company promotes organic farming efforts. These sauces are also very easy and handy. We’ve tried two flavors, the Madras and the Jalfrezi, they are both tomato and pepper based and pretty similar tasting, but the Madras is spicier and the Jalfrezi has coconut in it.  Jake even liked his broccoli and cauliflower in the Jalfrezi sauce.

Quick and Easy Vegetarian Indian
2 cups of cooked brown basmati rice
1 cup broccoli
1 cup cauliflower
1 cup potatoes
1 bunch spinach
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 can Seeds of Change Indian Simmer Sauce

Cut your broccoli, cauliflower and potatoes into bite sized pieces. Set up a steamer with a couple of inches of water in it and bring to a boil. Add your potatoes to the steamer basket and steam for about 10 minutes, add the broccoli and cauliflower and steam for about 5 more minutes or until they are soft enough for your liking. In the meantime, add about 2 tablespoons of olive oil to a pan and heat on the stove top over medium heat for a few minutes. Add the spinach and stir around, then cover. Cook for 2-3 minutes and remove from heat. Add the steamed vegetables to the spinach and add the jar of simmer sauce. Serve over cooked brown basmati rice.

My mom has been on the look out for cookbooks for our family, that meet both Jake’s requirements of being allergy free, and my requirement of being gluten free.  I can’t remember where she heard of this little book, but it is written by Jennifer Katzinger who has a bakery in Seattle called Flying Apron bakery.  The cookbook is both gluten-free and vegan, so uses no milk or eggs, and in their place, she uses a lot of sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and yams.  I’ve seen some book reviews mention that some vegans do not consider honey vegan, and honey is used throughout this book, but you could substitute agave nectar for honey if that is a concern.

I really had trouble deciding which of these delicious looking recipes I should start with and the Blueberry Cinnamon Scones recipe ended up winning.  Jeremy and I had gotten in the bad habit of going to Starbucks on Saturday mornings to get coffee cake and coffees before I found out I needed to eat gluten free.  These little trips have been one of our few luxuries over the past year and I was really missing my morning cinnamon treats, so this recipe sounded like a great place to start.  I had never thought of putting blueberry and cinnamon together before, but in the description of the recipe, the author writes that cinnamon and blueberries “should be together as often as possible”.  Boy was she right!  These are delicious.  I’ve made them several times now, and they make 8 scones for the recipe.  Because this is really too many scones for us to eat, I experimented with freezing the dough and now we can make 2 or 3 scones for us and freeze the rest of the batch.  When my in-laws were in town a few weeks ago I made the dough ahead of time and then on Saturday morning just popped the dough in the oven and 25 min later or so, fresh baked scones!

Well we’ve tried a couple of other recipes out of the book now as well and they are all great.  We still have beets in our fridge from the winter CSA and I talked Jeremy into letting me make the Borscht for supper, which was a bit of a hard sell.  Borscht is a Russian beet stew, this one had beets, carrots, cabbage and sweet potatoes, and lots of dill.  She used a cashew cream in place of sour cream, which we thought was surprisingly good.  This is now one of my favorite ways to use beets, and something I had not thought of before and Jeremy actually ended up liking it pretty well.

The third recipe we’ve tried is a Moroccan Bean Salad over Baby Spinach with butternut squash.  We did not have a butternut squash but did have a giant crazy looking blue hubbard squash that we’ve been needing to use.

Jeremy has been calling this squash a “spider squash” and saying that when I cut into it he thought a bunch of little spiders were going to run out because it was so creepy looking.  It is a big squash, probably at least 5 pounds and about the size of 2 butternut squash, and just for the record, when I cut into it, no spiders ran out.  The blue hubbard squash tasted just like a normal winter squash despite it’s strange look.

Back to the recipe, the moroccan bean salad also turned out really well, the white beans and squash were very filling and the spices including cinnamon, turmeric and ginger were different than i was used to but very good.  She calls for it over a bed of spinach, but I actually cooked the spinach and mixed it up with the beans.  I’m not a huge fan of raw spinach, but cooked in the salad it was great.

I would highly recommend this cookbook to anyone wanting to cook vegan and/or gluten free, and especially if you need to cook both (for those just needing to cook vegan, be warned that you will have to purchase some specialty ingredients because of the recipes being gluten free).  This is a great cookbook for our family because it is so hard for me to find recipes that are both gluten free and vegan, and when we do find them, they aren’t always great…. but I can’t wait to try more recipes from this cookbook!  And… if I’m ever in Seattle I am definitely going to the Flying Apron Bakery.